by Joshua Bloom
Increasingly worried that the antiwar movement was eroding confidence in both his leadership and the war effort, Johnson launched a public relations campaign to allay public fears about the war’s progress. The handsome young general William Westmoreland was particularly effective, assuring TV audiences he was “very, very encouraged” that the United States was “making real progress.”15
Then came the Tet offensive. Without warning, on the eve of “Tet,” the Vietnamese New Year, January 30, 1968, the National Liberation Front simultaneously attacked the U.S.-supported Vietnamese government in thirty-six of the forty-four provincial capitals of South Vietnam, causing a widespread breakdown in government authority and suspension of the constitutional process by South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu. In the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon, NLF forces penetrated the supposedly invulnerable U.S. embassy, and the press carried pictures of American soldiers lying dead inside the compound. In four days of fighting, 281 American troops were killed and 1,195 were wounded. Fighting persisted in Saigon for a week. In Hue, the former imperial capital in central Vietnam, the NLF seized power. It took three weeks of aerial bombing and the destruction of eighteen thousand of the twenty thousand houses in Hue for U.S. allies to reclaim the city. All told, at least twelve thousand Vietnamese civilians were killed and countless refugees had to be evacuated to restore order in South Vietnam.16
In the United States, the reports of the Tet offensive intensified public concern that the war was wrong and that it would be long and bloody and cost many more American lives. The bloody battle belied Johnson’s assertion that American victory was near and strengthened the claim of many in the antiwar movement that the NLF had popular support and that people were fighting for self-determination and would to go to any length to resist U.S. imperialism. The “Vietcong remain adamant in their struggle to overthrow the South Vietnamese Government and force the United States out of the country,” the New York Times reported, quoting a captured NLF soldier: “An easy victory costs little blood, a difficult victory costs much blood. . . . Regardless, the result will be victory.”17
Public approval of Johnson’s handling of the war plummeted after Tet.18 A February poll showed that for the first time, a majority of Americans believed that it was a “mistake” to keep U.S. troops in Vietnam.19 The press also turned against the war. Even Walter Cronkite, the nation’s most respected anchorperson, renowned for his journalistic objectivity, came out against the war. In February, upon returning from an investigative tour of Vietnam, he reported that the president’s policies were failing there.20
On March 12, Eugene McCarthy, critical of Johnson’s handling of the war, almost beat him in the New Hampshire primary, garnering 42 percent of the vote to Johnson’s 49 percent. Four days later, with Johnson’s vulnerability clear, Robert Kennedy—the former attorney general, younger brother of slain President John F. Kennedy, and now a senator with powerful political and financial backing and widespread appeal—entered the race.21
Johnson circulated a draft speech to several close advisers on March 28 taking a hard-line, hawkish stance advancing the war. Clark Clifford, Johnson’s newly appointed secretary of defense and one of his closest advisers, told the president he could not give the speech. “What seems not to be understood,” he said, “is that major elements of the national constituency—the business community, the press, the churches, professional groups, college presidents, students, and most of the intellectual community—have turned against this war.”22 In the last days of March, Johnson reassigned General Westmoreland and denied the military’s request for 209,000 new troops, setting a ceiling of 549,500 troops for Vietnam. Johnson’s advisers drafted a new speech. On March 31, the president gave this revised speech to the nation largely as drafted. He said he was moving toward de-escalation in Vietnam, halting bombing north of the 20th parallel, and hoping to open peace talks with the communists.23
Then Johnson made an announcement that surprised many of his advisers as well as much of the nation. Lyndon B. Johnson, who had won the 1964 presidential election with more than 90 percent of the electoral college and the largest percentage of the popular vote ever recorded in U.S. history, announced he would not seek re-election in 1968.24 Exuberant college students poured out of dormitories across the country cheering, “The hawk is dead!”25
DEMOCRATS BETRAY THE BASE
Despite widespread opposition to the war, Vice President Hubert Humphrey soon entered the presidential race with the support of the Democratic Party establishment, pledging to pursue the war. On June 5, on a platform critical of the Vietnam War, Robert Kennedy won the California Democratic primary. Many antiwar liberals celebrated the victory, rallying around Kennedy as the likely Democratic nominee. But at his victory celebration that evening at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, Kennedy was assassinated.
The Democratic nomination and the party’s position on Vietnam would be decided at the Democratic National Convention that August in Chicago. The National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (“the MOBE”), a coalition of ideologically diverse antiwar organizations that had organized the Pentagon protests, planned demonstrations to take place outside the convention.26 Organizers also invited the Black Panthers to speak. In late August, Bobby Seale and David Hilliard flew to Chicago.27
Only when challenged do authorities reveal where they are willing to compromise and what they will do to hold onto power. Despite widespread opposition to the war among registered Democrats, the party leadership was not willing to cede ground on its Vietnam policy. Yet the vociferous resistance within the party challenged the legitimacy of the Democratic leadership, which attempted to repress the resistance. In preparation for the convention, Chicago mayor Richard Daley sealed off the convention site with barbed wire, refused to grant permits to many protestors and stalled on other requests, placed all twelve thousand Chicago police officers on twelve-hour shifts, mobilized more than five thousand National Guardsmen and provided them with riot training, and called in six thousand U.S. Army troops equipped with flame-throwers, bayonets, bazookas, and machine guns mounted on Jeeps.28
Small but disruptive protests through the weekend of August 24 and the early part of the week encountered aggressive police. A troop of 150 police broke up a protestor encampment at Lincoln Park with tear gas and nightsticks.29 Many in the black community watched the conflict with interest, remembering Daley’s “shoot to kill” orders during the black rebellion in Chicago following King’s assassination in April. Hundreds of young black people from the Chicago area joined the confrontations.30 Police removed badges and beat both protestors and news reporters with abandon.31
Inside the convention hall, the Democratic Party leadership was busy repressing another kind of challenge. During the primary election, registered Democrats had displayed overwhelming opposition to the administration’s policy in Vietnam, and 80 percent had voted for candidates critical of the Vietnam War. True to the voters, a group of antiwar delegates proposed a plank to the platform committee calling for de-escalation in Vietnam along the lines proposed by McCarthy and Kennedy. But the platform committee endorsed a prowar plank and pushed this through on the floor a few days later. Then, on Wednesday August 29, although antiwar candidates McCarthy and Kennedy had received the vast majority of the primary votes cast, convention delegates handpicked by party machine leaders nominated prowar Hubert Humphrey for president. Downtown Chicago exploded that night.32
More than ten thousand people gathered for a legally sanctioned nonviolent protest at Grant Park across the street from the Hilton Hotel where many delegates were staying. When someone lowered the American flag, the police swooped in, bloodying a number of protestors. Black Panther chairman Bobby Seale told the protestors: “If you dissent, your heads will be whipped and your skulls will be cracked. . . . Every time the people disagree with the basic decisions of the power structure it sends in its arms, guns, and force to make them agree.”33
Tom Hayden, a founde
r and former president of the Students for a Democratic Society, took the microphone and called for the protestors to shake up the city: “The city and the military machinery it has aimed at us won’t permit us to protest in an organized fashion. Therefore, we must move out of this park in groups throughout the city, and turn this overheated military machine against itself. Let us make sure that if blood flows, it flows all over the city. If they use gas against us, let us make sure they use gas against their own citizens.”34 The action on the street was electric as young people of various races and social classes confronted the police head-on. SDS developed “affinity groups” to act in a “guerilla” fashion, avoiding police attack and moving the melee into the busy streets of Chicago.
Now disillusioned, many of the antiwar liberal kids who had poured their hearts into McCarthy’s campaign joined the radicals confronting the police in the streets. Even those who had tried to quiet the protests earlier because they believed they would dampen McCarthy’s chances joined in. Some threw rocks at the police, who in turn stormed McCarthy’s headquarters on the fifteenth floor of the Hilton, tossing several staff members out of bed and breaking a club over one’s head. The McCarthyites’ anger grew: “Well, from now on it’s the Battle of Algiers,” one declared. Soldiers chased protestors through the streets of downtown Chicago, spraying them with tear gas through converted flamethrowers. The gas was so thick that even Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey had trouble breathing in his suite in the Hilton many stories above the street. The carpet in the hotel lobby was covered with vomit from those made sick by the gas. Out on the streets, small groups of protestors, confronted by police, dispersed, circled, and regrouped. The police lined up platoon style, shouting “Kill, Kill, Kill” with clubs raised. Any protestor the police caught, along with many news reporters and other bystanders, were knocked to the ground and beaten. One group was pushed through the plate-glass window of the Hilton’s Haymarket Lounge by police.35
Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut condemned Daley for “Gestapo” tactics. Other official delegates held up signs comparing Chicago to Prague, where Soviet troops and tanks were crushing a liberal Czech movement.36 All told, more than 1,000 people, including 192 police, were injured and 662 were arrested. One young man was shot to death by the police.
Panther minister of information Eldridge Cleaver held a press conference, announcing, “We have been driven out of the political arena. . . . We will not dissent from the American Government. We will overthrow it.”37 Renowned journalist I. F. Stone declared, “The war is destroying our country as we are destroying Vietnam.” Kennedy aide Richard Goodwin said, “This is just the beginning.”38 In the revolutionary mood following Chicago, tens of thousands of young people joined the New Left. The greatest growth was in the months following Chicago. By the time of the presidential elections in November, SDS alone had at least eighty thousand members—up from thirty-five thousand in April.39
THE GREATEST THREAT
The insurgents had split the governing Democratic coalition. The Democratic Party leadership was unwilling to yield to the antiwar position of the party base. The Democrats had embraced civil rights, losing traditional support from the Dixiecrats. But they had failed to address the persistent poverty, lack of political representation, ghettoization, and police brutality that were the core concerns of Black Power activists.
Richard Nixon took advantage of the fractures in the Democratic coalition by seeking to unify the Republican Party behind a “Law and Order” platform. He attacked the Democrats by attacking the rebels. He blamed the flagging war effort in Vietnam and the growing black and antiwar rebellions on the Democrats’ weakness. “The long dark night for America is about to end,” Nixon pledged.40 Nixon called for tough government action to repress the rebels: “It is too late for more commissions to study violence. It is time for the government to stop it. The people of this country want an end to government that acts out of a spirit of neutrality or beneficence or indulgence towards criminals. We must cease as well the granting of special immunities and moral sanctions to those who deliberately violate public laws—even when those violations are done in the name of peace or civil rights or anti-poverty or academic reform.”41
Positioning himself to capture the conservatives in the Democratic Party who were deeply troubled by social unrest and wanting to attract as much of the white supremacist vote as he could, Nixon conflated crime, ghetto rebellion, civil rights, and student protest. The gambit worked. On November 5, by the thinnest of margins, Nixon was elected the thirty-seventh president of the United States.42
From the first days of his presidency, Nixon took a personal interest in repressing the Black Panther Party. In early 1969, he asked FBI director Hoover how extensively the Justice Department was targeting the Party. Nixon was displeased when Hoover reported little action and said he would inform Attorney General John Mitchell of the importance of moving against the Panthers.43 In response, Mitchell’s Justice Department identified the Panthers as a “menace to national security” and set up a task force on extremism—independent of FBI activities—whose main charter was to repress the Panthers. One plan of action the department considered was wide legal prosecution of Black Panthers for “conspiring to advocate the violent overthrow of the government” under the Smith Act that had been used to jail Communists in the 1950s.44
On July 15, 1969, Hoover publicly announced that of all the black nationalist groups, “the Black Panther Party, without question, represents the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”45 This statement stood in stark contrast to earlier public statements by the FBI about the Panthers. The FBI report for fiscal year 1968, which was released on October 1, 1968, barely mentioned the Panthers, and its report for 1967 had not mentioned them at all.46 But by the fall of 1968, the FBI was secretly developing what would become its most intensive program to repress any black political organization. Of 295 actions initiated by the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program to destabilize black nationalist organizations, 233 of them—or 79 percent—targeted the Black Panther Party.47 Federal actions against the Panthers ranged from spreading false information about misappropriation of party money to fomenting marital strife, and in some cases, participating in planned killings of Panther leaders.
COINTELPRO aimed to undermine the Black Panthers’ ability to threaten the political status quo. Toward that end, its agents tried to foster divisions between the Panthers and potential recruits and between the Party and other organizations, as well as among the Black Panthers themselves.
No aspect of the Black Panther program was of greater concern to the FBI than the Free Breakfast for Children Program, which fostered widespread support for the Panthers’ revolutionary politics. Hoover drove home this point in an airtel to the special agent in charge in San Francisco on May 27, 1969:
You state that the Bureau under the CIP [COINTELPRO] should not attack programs of community interest such as the [Black Panther Party] “Breakfast for Children.” You state that this is because many prominent “humanitarians,” both white and black, are interested in the program as well as churches which are actively supporting it. You have obviously missed the point. . . . You must recognize that one of our primary aims in counterintelligence as it concerns the [Party] is to keep this group isolated from the moderate black and white community which may support it. This is most emphatically pointed out in their Breakfast for Children Program, where they are actively soliciting and receiving support from uninformed whites and moderate blacks.48
The FBI took extensive measures to undermine support for the Panthers’ breakfast program. For example, agents sent forged letters and incendiary propaganda to supermarkets to dissuade them from providing food and impersonated concerned parishioners to dissuade churches from providing space for the program.49
Various branches of the federal government mobilized to address the political threat posed by the Panthers. In response to White House interest in Internal Revenue Service (IRS) s
upport of efforts to repress “ideological organizations,” the IRS established the Activist Organizations Committee in July 1969 to “collect basic intelligence data” on members of the Black Panther Party, organizations that did business with the Black Panther Party, and other “radical” political organizations. The FBI supplied the IRS with the names of individuals and organizations. The IRS, in return, supplied detailed personal financial information and also targeted these individuals for special enforcement of tax regulations.50
In June 1970, a joint report by the FBI, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Committee, and the National Security Agency identified the Black Panther Party as the most “active and dangerous” black nationalist threat to internal security. The report expressed particular concern about widespread grassroots support for the Party, noting, “A recent poll indicates that approximately 25 percent of the black population has a great respect for the [Black Panther Party], including 43 percent of blacks under 21 years of age.” The report also emphasized the large, 150,000 weekly circulation of the Panther newspaper, 189 speaking engagements on college campuses in 1969, strong support from the Students for a Democratic Society and other New Left groups, the appeal of the Black Panthers to blacks in the military, and the Party’s international support from students in Europe, guerilla movements in the Middle East, and the governments of Cuba, North Korea, and Algeria.51
Before Nixon’s election as president, there had not been a single police raid of a Black Panther office. Police had stopped and arrested small groups of Panthers selling the Black Panther newspaper. They had also confronted Panthers in spontaneous conflicts outside Panther offices in New York and Denver, and in the Bay Area, they had raided the homes of Bobby Seale and the Cleavers, encountering minimal resistance.52
